The present invention relates generally to electronic medical records and in particular to a system that simplifies the communication of electronic medical records among healthcare institutions involved in a patient's healthcare.
Electronic medical records are increasingly used in medical institutions such as clinics and hospitals as the primary source of clinical medical information for the treatment of patients. Such electronic medical records provide both a quickly accessible medical history of the patient and a convenient way for healthcare professionals to coordinate their efforts on the patient's behalf.
Ideally, electronic medical records could be made portable so as to provide continuity of care as a patient moves among institutions and electronic systems. Standard data formats for medical records, such as CCR and CCD, promote such portability by simplifying the import or export of data from a particular institution's medical record system. But these formats are not universally available or implemented, limiting their current impact on portability. Further, even with consistent data formats, the process of exporting data from one institution and importing it to another requires a substantial degree of preparation by the parties, including, for example, a request by a patient, identification of the appropriate records, preparation of required releases, transfer of the data, identifying corresponding files in the new record system, merging the imported data into the appropriate records, and notification to the patient. For this reason, a patient requiring healthcare on an urgent basis, in an unfamiliar venue, may not be able to rely on healthcare records at another institution regardless of their portability.